Domino’s tests out pizza ordering through Facebook

Designed as an application within the Domino’s Pizza Facebook brand pages in Australia and New Zealand, customers in those countries can now order a pizza without ever having to leave Facebook. Fairly identical to ordering through the company site, the application walks the customer through a typical order process and they can choose to pick up their pizza or have it delivered. The application also comes with the popular pizza tracker that allows a customer to check up on the progress of their pizza. Connected into Facebook’s Open Graph initiative, the application can automatically share which pizza that the customer orders on the user’s Timeline page as well.

According to Domino’s Online Marketing Director Michael Gillespie, he stated “Our Facebook ordering gives pizza lovers the chance to order from their local store quickly, ‘like’ their favourite pizzas and share both experiences with their friends on Facebook easily – all without leaving the social media environment.” This application works on laptops, desktops and tablets, but the Facebook mobile smartphone application doesn’t include support for this app.

Gillespie didn’t indicate if any notifications are sent to the user when the status of an order changes during the tracking process. During 2008, Pizza Hut got into trouble with a poorly designed Facebook application designed for online pizza orders. The application soon disappeared off Pizza Hut’s Facebook brand page after customers complained about the overwhelming amount of advertisements disguised as notifications that appeared on friend’s pages. For instance, when a user logged into the Pizza Hut application, it would display “USER NAME has just logged on to order from Pizza Hut!!!” on a friend’s notification ticker.

This new service is currently available to anyone residing within Australia and New Zealand that wants to become a fan of those two respective Facebook pages. The Domino’s Pizza New Zealand page currently has about 156,000 fans and the Australia page has about 570,000 fans. Management at the U.S. Domino’s Pizza headquarters have made no indication if this Facebook ordering system will become available to the 6.6 million fans on the U.S. page.